Chances are this is a thread already. But anyway I'll post. Right now I only have 2 that I must have when ever I eat at a Japanese restaurant. I tried Yakisoba, but I think their might have been a spice inside that I didnt care for. Other than that I love noodles. Also:Hibachi ChickenChicken Tempura

Other contenders are unagi don, toufu (prepared in various ways) and gyouza.

I'm with becki-san when it comes to curries. Indian curries (which vary greatly north to south) are my favourites followed by Thai curries. I don't mind Japanese style cuury rice at all.

On the topic of rice dishes I also really like omuraisu which is a more contemporary Japanese dish.

two_heads_talking wrote:.... okonomiyaki with cabbage, carrots, chicken and onions is awesome. a bit of kewpie and some bulldog sauce (tonkatsu) makes a savory topper..

The Bulldog Sauce I have is Japanese style Worcestershire sauce. Is that the same?

Bulldog has quite a few sauces.. Tonkatsu sauce is made specifically for pork so it goes great with most white meats.. It also has a vegetable and fruit sauce that goes great with stir fry. My kids actually like to put this sauce directly over rice (I know the Japanese aren't fond of mixing anything with rice, but the savory flavor is pretty nice.) The Tonkatsu sauce and the vegetable sauce are rather thick and the Worchestershire sauces I am familiar with are very thin.

I had something in Japan which was like an Omelette in a way, and it was cooked on a hot plate in front of you.And served with a very tasty pink-ish sauce and I can't for the life of me remember the name. Very annoying.Can anyone help?

Fugu. There's a little ramshackle place that serves a "fugu zanmai course." I forget the exact content of the course, but it includes sashimi, shirako, karaage, nabe--all fugu. The sashimi is cut so thin it's translucent in the fluorescent light of the dingy zashiki. Add some Kubota no Manju, the cold Japanese night afterwards, and you've got yourself a bona fide Japanese experience.

OH the goodness.My favorite part is when it tries to run away while you're cooking it.

My wife tried raw awabi in a sushi restaurant in Tokyo (Asakasa). It was very expensive so I didn't try any. Awabi "fishing" is a big industry where her family are from and there are now people there starting to farm it.

I have never seen an awabi "run". The best you could describe it as is a very slow crawl.

Don't complain to me that people kick you when you're down. It's your own fault for lying there

Maybe someone can enlighten me. There was an izakaya I once went to that had a tank full of little fish, maybe two or three inches long. The fish were served as tempura. The cook would scoop out a batch, dump them into a bowl of flour (or whatever the koromo is--I don't know anything about cooking), still jumping and flipping around, and then dump them straight into the boiling oil to deep fry them. In other words, normal tempura, except that the fish were fried alive, which I suppose is fairly humane, since they died after a single instant of excruciating pain. Actually, I guess the koromo would extend that instant a bit, but anyway, not too bad.

What was really inhumane, however, is that there was some kind of hot pepper bobbing around at the surface of the fishtank, and it was apparently pretty painful, because the fish were in a constant mad race away from it. The fish were literally jamming themselves into the corners of the fishtank furthest from the pepper, which would sort of bob around, this way and that, due to the water practically churning around because of the mad swimming. Non-stop pain, 24-hours-a-day. I asked the chef what the point of that was, and he said "身がもっと引き締まるから" and of course there's nothing worse than fish whose 身 isn't 引き締まっている (although, doesn't that only apply to raw fish? how could it apply to cooked fish?).

Anyway, I'm sure the fish, if they had any kind of philosophical self-awareness, welcomed death with open arms. Even the one relatively pain-free moment when they're flipping around in the flour has got to be bittersweet, since they can't breathe.